Mark Crick / Features / Untitled Books

After half an hour of this inertia I hurry to the toilet and stand retching over the bowl. Like the writing, the build up promises more than the performance.

Mark Crick

Mark Crick, author of Sartre's Sink, teaches DIY at the School of Life, and cuts a sartorial dash at the House of Lords.

There seem to be so many ways to be cruel while keeping a pet and so few ways to keep them kindly. I now start to worry about the fish in the garden pond.

Monday

I usually spend the first part of the morning writing. For some reason the telephone always startles me so I usually turn off the sound on the landline, unplug my email connection and switch off my mobile. Before I manage this, there is the sound of vibrating from the hall and a text from my sister tells me to buy a copy of The Independent. My new book Sartre's Sink, The Great Writers Complete Book of DIY, has been out for a couple of weeks now and seems to have gone largely unnoticed by the press. I put off going to the shop for as long as I can. I'm shooting a portrait later this morning and the newspaper will be a distraction. Just finding the article could take half an hour; it once took me two days to find a small piece the Telegraph ran on a Sunday. It turned out to be next to a very good offer for late season seed potatoes. I put the newspaper out of my mind and keep my head down.

Instead of a launch party to celebrate the book, I'm giving a series of DIY lessons. The idea came from Sophie Howarth, founder of The School of Life. The school doesn't lend itself to a quick description, but aims to provide ways of leading a more fulfilling life. Bravely, they have invited me in for the week to do just that through DIY and literature, and every evening this week I will be reading one of the chapters. Tonight: Learn to Hang Wallpaper - Ernest Hemingway style.

I'm due to shoot a portrait of the actor and performer Simon Green. He's taking his one man show to New York over Christmas and we're taking some new photographs. Simon insists that he now looks too old to use the shots we did a few years back. He looks unchanged to me but I know what he means. I can remember someone looking at my author pic at the back of Kafka's Soup, maybe only nine months after it was taken, then looking back at me and saying, "This is an old photo, right?" Simon's running ten minutes late and I just have time to grab the newspaper and some long life croissants from the Spar. DIY with Hunter S Thompson is mentioned on the front cover of the paper, that's good. Inside the extract runs over five pages; I was right, it is a distraction.

The School of Life has had almost as much coverage in the press as the credit crunch's school of hard of knocks. When I arrive, both Time magazine and the German title Stern are there, and are curious enough about Hemingway wallpapering to stay for the reading. When it is over, we head to the pub.

Tuesday

'Be Commanded by Julius Caesar on how to Put Up a Shelf' announces the poster for tonight's lesson. Caesar wakes with a hangover, filled with a mixture of self-pity and contempt. As usual, I take my place at the laptop. Like two dancers on a stage, my trembling hands take their positions, waiting for the band to strike up in the orchestra pit of my mind. But nothing happens. After half an hour of this inertia I hurry to the toilet and stand retching over the bowl. Like the writing, the build up promises more than the performance. Nothing happens and the porcelain remains as white as the back lit page I have just abandoned. It is now 8.30. In just two hours Simon Green is due to return to look over his pictures. I can't have him see me like this. I decide to call him and cancel, but before I can find the phone, I come across the sofa and the urge to lie down with my head under a blanket proves irresistible.

I drunk so little, how has it come to this?

I doze off, but eventually the pain in my stomach wakes me and I rush back to the toilet. This time I'm sick. Three times. Success, of a sort. While I am splashing water on my face the doorbell rings. God, its 10.30am already. I look in the mirror and see I am as white as a sheet. In my red and green bathrobe I look like the ghost of Christmas past.

Discarding his cycling helmet, and radiating health and vitality, Simon enters the gloomy hall and in a voice that would reach row Q of the upper circle compliments me on my casual dress. Until he sees my face. "My god what's happened?" I am too embarrassed to admit that a measly two glasses of wine and two pints of Guinness have done this to me. I tell him I have the flu.

Wednesday

I am shooting this morning. Two clients are announcing a merger at a reception in the House of Lords. I mustn't forget my invitation, nor the little slip of pink paper from Black Rod's office that says I am allowed to take pictures. I also need to wear a suit, carry 20kg of cameras and a laptop, and find a door to serve as a prop for tonight's reading.

There isn't really time for my morning writing session but I try to squeeze it in and find myself in trouble. In a rush, I shave and put on my suit before I think to bring up the door from the cellar. When finally I descend through the thicket of spider webs, the once-white door has five years of something collected on it, dust I suppose, but it looks more like mould. Grubby footed spiders and insects, mice even, and not to forget the rat that was living in the cellar a couple of years ago, have been making their homes about its once proud panels. To spare me the shame of sharing my home with a rat, my former assistant Matt used to refer to the rat as the spider,
"Have you seen the spider this week?"
"Yes I've seen him. He was pulling the stuffing out of a cushion. I think he's making a nest."
By the time I've got the door to the top of the cellar stairs and hauled it into the porch, I look like a chimney sweep. My hands and clothes are covered in a damp soot-like deposit that doesn't seem to brush off. I change in to my other suit, the one that looks like it might once have been rejected by Evelyn Waugh for being too old fashioned. Dressed in a tweed three-piece with a rucksack on my back, I head off to the House looking like a late arrival from the Jarrow March.

This evening I am to read the Anais Nin chapter. An actress, Michelle Barlow, agrees to read with me. With only half an hour to prepare, we run through the text. Gradually the piece becomes a dialogue. It works very well, much better than it would have if I'd read on my own. Further proof, if I needed it, that real actors make writing come to life.
Whenever I hear my work read by actors, invariably they read better than I do. Where there is confusion they bring clarity, faults become virtues and jokes start to be funny. No wonder so many writers want to write plays; the actors will go over the top and face the audience while the authors sit safely out of sight in their bunkers.

Thursday

Routine disrupted yet again, though it strikes me now that my 'routine' cannot strictly be so called. In fact, any type of routine is itself an interruption to the normal smooth running of a sequence of interruptions. Last week I photographed a member of the royal family visiting some hospital accommodation and the requests for copies are getting out of hand. The house is freezing. I try to do some yoga to warm up but since I am asthmatic and have some kind of chest infection at present I am quickly out of breath. I am now breathless and cold.

I decide to bring lunch forward, to 10.30am. I make cheese on toast and crouch reading by the orange glow of the grill. The book is the Philosopher and the Wolf, the story of the author's life with his pet wolf Brenin. I am fascinated to read how he sets about training a wolf. I never succeeded in training my Scottish terrier. The philosopher argues that he is not unkind in keeping a wolf as a pet and my thoughts turn to Percy, the guinea pig I had as a child. Percy lived in a hutch in the shed at the bottom of our garden in Basildon. In the winter, when he was confined to his hutch, I used to go and sing to him. Paint Your Wagon had just come out and I remember once singing I was Born under a Wandering Star. It probably wasn't appropriate for a guinea pig in solitary confinement.

There seem to be so many ways to be cruel while keeping a pet and so few ways to keep them kindly. I now start to worry about the fish in the garden pond.

The early lunch hasn't done much to fight the cold and I put on my corduroy jacket. Whenever a sleeve rubs against the body of the jacket in a particular way the clash of cords send s a vibration through the fabric and I imagine the phone to be ringing. The wearing of corduroy is making me very jumpy. Despite the cold, the snow has now turned to rain. When I leave the house I wear a hat, less likely to be left behind than an umbrella. In the train, looking at it on the seat opposite me, I notice for the first time that it is similar to the hat worn by my grandfather. He was bald and, when out of doors, always wore a hat. In fact, all the men in his family were bald. At my grandmothers funeral last year my uncle, also bald, told me he remembered coming to my grandparents house for a party one Christmas and unsure of the address, walked along the row of houses on Wickham Lane until he saw three bald heads protruding over the back of a sofa.

At the reading that evening, 'Goethe Applies Bath Sealant'. My editor has come along and she asks me if I've thought about my next book. I begin to outline a story in which a family pet undergoes a long period of solitary confinement, the animal fears that he may be the last of his race, ("Imagine Gerald Durrell meets Arthur Koestler.") I have perhaps gone on too long; she is now clearing the old travelcards from her purse and asks me if I know what zone Tufnell Park is in.

Friday

I quite often go to write in a local café. I can't start doing the housework, there's no washing up and no desk to rearrange. I order a bowl of muesli, yoghurt and honey but before I have finished my publicist, Lindsay, calls to say that the Guardian would like to film a couple of readings for their website. Can I be ready for 2pm? I'll need to do some wallpapering and some other general DIY.

I spend the afternoon mixing paste, hanging wallpaper and pretending to lay a floor with only a small sheet of plywood to hand. The poor journalist will have to call on all her powers to make something of this. By the time we finish guests are already arriving for this evening's Halloween reading. Brigid and Lindsay from Granta are mixing green and red punch and laying out horrific snacks to a soundtrack of swarming flies and other nasty sounds. Finally, we're ready to go; the basement of the School is packed. At a word from Sophie, the guests all sit cross-legged on the floor and the lights go out. A 10-watt bulb swings dimly from side to side and we enter the eerie world of Edgar Allan Poe, and learn how to board an attic.

Saturday

Normally a day when I work in the library. I realise I am now a member of five different libraries. My favourite is The London Library in St James Square. It is wonderfully eccentric, like the land that time forgot. I've actually seen men in deerstalkers and capes there, possibly stalking mythical beasts in the lesser known backwaters of its labyrinthine shelving. When I want to feel like an undergraduate again I go to the British Library which feels like a vast university, and when I wish I'd been a scientist I go the magnificent Wellcome Library on Euston Road. But it's been a busy week and I give in to whatever it is I'm suffering from.

Instead, I take my bicycle to the repair shop. On the way back I call in at the supermarket, something I do so rarely that despite having five library cards I still haven't a nectar card. When the lady at the checkout asks for my card I do what I usually do and pass the question on to the person behind me in the queue. She looks quite shocked as though she has misheard me, finally she says in heavily accented English "You want to give me your points?"
"Yes," I say, "I want to give you my points."
"He hasn't got a card; he wants to give you his points," the cashier shouts at her. She hesitates before producing her card and then at the last minute holds it back. "Will anything happen to me?"

Sunday

I am determined to be a better pet owner. I rake leaves in the garden. Clear rotting lily pads from the pond and then erect a net over the water to protect the goldfish from the evil effects of decaying leaves and lignin. Occasionally I sing while I work, but nothing from Paint Your Wagon.